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The MIT Combat Robotics Club (CRC) uses the tagline “build, battle, destroy, repeat,” which is a pretty spot-on description for a club that embraces learning opportunities through destruction.
“We make fighting robots,” explains Ryan Duarte, the 2025-26 CRC captain and current captain of a sub team for CRC’s ARES robot. “We try and make something indestructible to kill someone else's creation [that] they've tried to make indestructible … and they're trying to kill ours. In other competitions, the winner is who scores more points. You can tell at the end of a match by looking at [the robots] who the winner is.”
The club, which was founded in 2001 and is housed in the MIT Edgerton Center, was rebooted in 2023 with new members and designs. CRC sub teams compete in the National Havoc Robot League (NHRL) Professional Robot Fighting League. Competitions are hosted approximately every two months, including “house battles” on campus for the MIT community and local teams. Fans of the hit show “BattleBots” might remember some of CRC’s past robots, including Uppercut, SawBlaze, the Dentist, and Overhaul.
ARES, named for the Greek god of war, competes in the 30-pound weight class (other NHRL categories include the 3lb and 12lb weight classes). The robot combines a “Beater Bar,” or vertical spinner, with a compact, dual redundant poly-v belt brushless weapon power system on a high-performance brushless four-wheel drive with lightweight aluminum, titanium, and ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene chassis.
Abi Dixon, 2026-27 CRC captain, says the fighting machine was created from “from steel, titanium, aluminum, and passion.” The robot was a top seed going into last winter’s 2025 NHRL World Championships, but failed to emerge victorious. “Our two losses with ARES were against two opponents which shared a similar weapon type which our underdeveloped armor couldn't withstand,” says Duarte. The team saw the losses as an opportunity to make improvements.
“A unique thing about our outlook for these competitions is that no matter how poorly a match goes on our end, afterwards the dominant emotion is still pride,” says Dixon.
“Being in this community and on this team has changed me,” she says, because “how can you put so much energy, so much love, so much blood, sweat, and tears into a machine and then be totally OK with putting it inside the cage and it exploding, and then literally picking up your pride off the floor, smushing it all back together, and getting back in there? You grow an understanding of finding the wins, even when things look like a complete loss.”
ARES, captained by Duarte, along with fellow Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) undergraduates Henry Dang, Kendall Binkley, and Liam Gault, has been undergoing improvements. The team took second place at an April competition and third in October. CRC is simultaneously upgrading ARES and another robot, KRATOS, while continuing progress toward a next generation of robots.
At MIT, the CRC is open to everyone regardless of year, major, or prior experience. It is entirely student-run, self-taught, and highly collaborative. Participants engineer tough, reliable, performant systems and have an opportunity to learn a variety of skills, from computer-aided design and finite element analysis to CNC machining and welding.
“Before MIT, I never had the opportunity to independently say, ‘I'm going to make this,’ and complete everything in the engineering process from start to finish. CRC embodies that vision, and solidified my desire to become an engineer,” says Eleni Morales, CRC team member, 2025-26 co-manufacturing chair, and undergraduate in MechE.
CRC welcomed 54 new members this fall semester. As an onboarding exercise, the new members are building 1-pound, or “ant weight,” combat robots in teams of three students.
“We remain committed to making the team accessible for students with all levels of technical experience (including none!) through a structured onboarding process that prioritizes each and every member feeling as though they have technical ownership over a part of their sub team’s robot,” says Dixon.
The team will host their third annual MIT Combat Robotics House Battle on Nov. 14 at the new Met Warehouse.
